Abstract
During a pandemic, vaccination plays an important role in reducing the infection spread or adverse outcomes such as hospitalizations and deaths. However, a vaccine’s overall public health impact depends not only on its initial efficacy, but also its efficacy against emerging variants and ease and speed of distribution. For example, mutations in SARS-CoV-2 raised concerns about diminishing vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19 caused by particular variants. Furthermore, due to supply-chain challenges, the accessibility and distribution of the vaccines have been hindered in many regions, especially in low-income countries, while the second or third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic has occurred due to the variants. Hence, we evaluated the interactions between the speed of distribution and efficacy against infection of multiple vaccines when variants emerge by utilizing a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered-Deceased model and assessing the level of infection attack rate. Our results show that speed is a key factor to a successful immunization strategy to control the pandemic even when the emerging variants may reduce the efficacy of a vaccine. Understanding the interactions between speed and efficacy and distributing vaccines that are available as quickly as possible are crucial to eradicate the pandemic before new variants spread.
【초록키워드】 COVID-19, public health, SARS-CoV-2, Efficacy, Vaccine, vaccination, pandemic, Mutation, Hospitalization, COVID-19 pandemic, variant, Infection, immunization, variants, adverse outcomes, adverse outcome, Spread, Accessibility, attack rate, hospitalizations, Effectiveness, understanding, distribution, speed, Interaction, deaths, key factor, regions, initial, occurred, caused, example, evaluated, raised, reducing, reduce, the vaccine, 【제목키워드】 Efficacy, COVID-19 vaccine, variant, distribution,